WikiProfessional Alpha Testing: a wiki of web 3.0

by Dr. Bertalan Meskó on September 5, 2007

I’ve already talked about WikiProfessional.org, a semantic medical and scientific wiki. This is a new site (currently in alpha testing) on which you can create now your personalized free Internet Desktop. What does it mean?

You can upload information about you and your scientific work and there is a Knowlet Space as well:

Exploring concepts using the Knowlet Space gives the user a view on the relationships between concepts found in a huge number of scientific publications in just a glance. The Knowlet histogram displaying the concepts related to the source concepts can be adjusted to give different views on the literature. A view on the experts publishing on the concepts of concepts of interest is also easily accessible in the Knowlet Space.

As you see, we can filter the results by semantic groups (anatomy, disease, etc.), you can browse among your own publications; but as it contains a lot of bugs and has just a few terms to search for, it’s hard to tell why this will be useful and valuable to the scientific community. The WikiProfessional.org is going to be the desktop for all the branch-wikis, like WikiProteins:

WikiProteins is a consortium initiative and is technically supported by the Open Progress Foundation and the company Knewco Inc. Wikiproteins functionality and content will be free to contributing scientists in perpetuity.

WikiProteins is in fact much broader than just a ‘proteomics’ oriented environment, although a main focus is on proteins and their role in biology and disease. Many other focused planned Wikis for Professionals will be developed but these will all operate on the same database system and will be fully interactive.

I’ve got three invitations to give away!Check out Scienceroll later for more information on this futuristic wiki!

Just checked out the site now that its in beta! I am wondering what your take on it is. The “knowlets” are too sparse, and the histogram for the knowlet space looks great but means very less to me
I enjoyed reading the paper a lot more than using their site. Two minutes into the ideas expressed in the paper didnt seem to be translating into the search aspect of the site. Most of my searches seemed to extract knowlets and papers that hardly seemed relevant.